This section describes the test planning phase of
the quality management lifecycle.
Test plan overview
The test plan describes the scope of the overall test effort and
provides a record of the test planning process. It identifies the features
and test environments to be tested, the entry and exit criteria to be used,
quality goals, and other items.
Creating test plans
The test plan captures the test requirements, test cases,
test execution criteria, and other information for a particular test
cycle.
Viewing existing test plans in a project
With IBM® Rational® Quality
Manager,
you can easily create a list of the existing test plans in a project.
If you have large projects with hundreds or thousands of test plans,
you can use the product's filtering capabilities to greatly reduce
the number of test plans in the view and help you locate the desired
test plans more quickly.
Managing sections of test plans and test cases
If some of the existing sections in a supplied test plan or test
case are not useful to you, you can remove them and add your own sections.
Managing categories
You can use test plan and test case categories to help you organize
your test plans and test cases into logical groups. Later, when you list all
of your test plans or test cases, you can use these categories to help you
sort and more easily manage the list.
Managing templates
Use templates as a starting point for test plans and test cases.
You can start with one of the default templates, or you can create new ones.
You can also designate which templates are the default.
Managing requirements in your test plan
If you have requirements defined in an external tool, such as IBM Rational RequisitePro®,
you can import them into Rational Quality Manager, where they are visible
in the Requirements view. You can also import requirements directly into test
plans and test cases. If a requirement is changed or deleted in the requirements
application source, the requirement status is updated in Rational Quality
Manager. You can also add requirements into your test plan manually.
Estimating the size of the test effort
As part of the planning process, you can create high-level estimates
of the size of the test planning and test execution efforts. You can also
provide detailed estimates of the time or effort required to run each individual
test case. These estimates help to measure your progress and provides input
to several reports.
Setting up a review process
With Quality Manager, you can set up a formal review process for
a test plan or test case.
Setting quality objectives
In the test plan you can list the quality objectives for the release.
Typically, quality objectives might include performance variables such as
the number of concurrent users that the application under test must support
or the time allowed for certain functions. As a quality objective, you might
also want to state the maximum number of severity one, severity two, and severity
three defects that you can accept before you declare a product ready to ship.
Defining entry and exit criteria
You can use the Entry Criteria section of the test plan to defines
the prerequisite items that must be achieved before testing can begin. You
can use the Exit Criteria section of the test plan to define the conditions
that must be met before testing can be concluded. In both cases, you add your
criteria by adding rows to a table.
Creating test schedules
In the Test Schedule section of the test plan, you can create high-level
schedules for each milestone or iteration. You can also list key project dates,
such as the date of the final release, code freeze, UI freeze, beta entry,
beta exit, and other dates.
Adding resource locations
Before you can browse to external test scripts that reside on shared
network resources, an administrator must make the resources available to Quality
Manager. After the resources are available, you can associate the test plan
with these shared network resources.
Attaching documents
You can attach existing files and documents, such as previous test
plans, schedules, screen captures, and other supporting material, to the test
plan or test case. As such, you can use the test plan as a means of tracking
all information that is relevant to the project.
Copying portions of existing documents
If you have content in external documents that you would like to
reuse, you can paste the content into the appropriate test plan or test case
section.